Raymond Arnette

Abbé Raymond Arnette

Raymond Arnette (born February 4, 1923 in Paris ; † April 28, 2004 in Frankenthal , Mörsch district ) was a Resistance spy in his youth with the Paris Gestapo , then a Catholic priest , first in the Archdiocese of Paris , later in the Archdiocese of Freiburg and finally from 1969 to 2004 in the Diocese of Speyer , author and activist known throughout Germany for the preservation of the so-called Tridentine liturgy .

Life

Origin and youth

Raymond Arnette was born the son of an atheist police officer whom he later baptized himself. The mother died when the boy was 5 years old. He grew up in Paris with his grandmother from Luxembourg . During the vacation period and after her death, he came to live with their relatives in Luxembourg, where he also found faith. He also grew up in three languages ​​- French, Luxembourgish and German - which was to be very useful to him later. In 1938 Arnette returned to Paris, attended the theological seminary and, when the war broke out, went back to the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, where he stayed until 1941. Then he returned home and lived with the father and stepmother. His father temporarily employed him for the police, who took him on patrols by the moral police in the Paris demi-world. Finally an activist of the Resistance approached him and recruited him for the resistance organization. He was supposed to be recruited as an interpreter by the Paris Gestapo and to be an informant there. Raymond Arnette did this from 1942 to 1944 and managed to warn the famous nuclear physicist Frédéric Joliot-Curie and save him from imminent arrest. The morning after the warning, he was forced to participate in a search of his laboratory. After the war, Arnette entered the seminary as he wished.

Act as a priest

On June 29, 1951, Raymond Arnette was ordained a priest in Paris, Notre Dame; he celebrated his first class in Luxembourg. His first position was as prefect of studies at the Paris school institute “Sainte Croix de Neuilly”. He later became director in Montrouge, and in March 1962 chaplain at the famous Sacré-Cœur basilica . In July 1962 he was arrested as a suspect and alleged OAS member and taken into custody, released in June 1963, later fully rehabilitated.

Raymond Arnette then left France in 1964 and went to Germany. Here he initially served as a military chaplain in the Archdiocese of Freiburg (Karlsruhe St. Bonifaz) and from August 28, 1969 worked as senior teacher for religious studies at the Albert Einstein high school in Frankenthal . He stayed in this position until his retirement on September 1, 1987. He was accepted (incardinated) by the episcopal ordinariate as a diocesan priest in the locally responsible diocese of Speyer. In the grammar school, the students of various denominations chose him for years as their liaison teacher and contact person.

Abbé Raymond Arnette at the wedding of a German-Indian couple in Frankenthal-Mörsch

Even during his time as a teacher, Arnette was also involved in pastoral care, especially in the Frankenthal parish of St. Trinity . Eventually he moved into the orphaned rectory in the Frankenthal district of Mörsch as a tenant and volunteered to do pastoral care in the village on a voluntary basis (without payment). He remained in this pastoral care beyond his retirement from 1977 to 1996. Raymond Arnette saw clear dangers for faith in the renewed liturgy of the Catholic Church - especially as it was celebrated all over the country. He represented roughly the same positions as Pope Benedict XVI later . , but 20 years earlier. The priest first began to celebrate masses in the new rite but with the old sacrificial prayers at the high altar, then those according to the missal from 1965 and finally he used the missal from 1962, which was written by Pope Benedict XVI. was recently rehabilitated as a fully valid and freely permitted form of measurement ( Tridentine Mass ). In addition to the parishioners, believers from a radius of more than 50 km attended these services and - in the absence of other such offers - a brisk influx from the entire region began. Quasi a personal parish in the Tridentine rite developed.

Abbé Raymond Arnette at the celebration of mass in the Tridentine rite.

On the one hand this was tolerated by the responsible diocese in Speyer, on the other hand there were also critical dissenting voices. Finally, the pastoral care of the 75-year-old priest was withdrawn in 1996 and from one week to the next he was no longer allowed to go to the Mörscher church; the door locks were replaced. Attempts were made to throw him out of the rectory, in which he lived as a private person and not as a pastor. An eviction operation against the elderly clergyman failed. Rather, he defended himself in court and was right. He did not have to move out and was allowed to live in the rectory until his death in 2004. The church in Mörsch remained closed to him, however, and the Diocese of Speyer allowed him and his believers to use the otherwise practically unused branch church of St. Martin in Einselthum , Donnersbergkreis. The priest had to cover a total distance of almost 70 km for each of his masses until he was old.

Raymond Arnette died completely unexpectedly, on April 28, 2004, in Frankenthal-Mörsch. He was buried in a preferred location in the Frankenthal city cemetery, which is reserved for special personalities in the community. The Requiem took place in the presence of the Speyer bishop Anton Schlembach in the parish church of St. Trinity, Frankenthal. The celebrant was Pastor Mathias Köller from Ottersheim. Then a solemn funeral procession, attended by several hundred believers, moved through the city to the cemetery. After the death of Raymond Arnette, the pastoral care of his old ritual group was officially taken over by the Diocese of Speyer - due to the changes that had now also taken place in Rome - and the place of celebration was relocated to Dirmstein , and since October 2010 to Neustadt an der Weinstrasse .

Special activities

As an activist and promoter of the Tridentine Mass, Raymond Arnette was known throughout the German-speaking world. When the church was blocked for him in 1996 and wanted to be thrown out of the rectory, a real press war broke out in the Rheinpfalz Frankenthal for weeks between opponents and supporters.

The rather corpulent Arnette, with his black cassock and his emphatically friendly manner, was part of the townscape in Frankenthal at the time. As a result of his adventurous life and shaped by it, he always had an open ear for outsiders and strangers. On his shopping trips he liked to talk to Muslims, whose deep religiousness he always admired. For a long time he promoted the Franco-German international understanding by organizing an annual bus tour he led to different areas of his home country. He also held cooking courses in French cuisine at the adult education center and published his recipes in book form. He was of the opinion that there was often a "crisis" in German marriages because here the women - in contrast to France - cooked so boringly; Love goes through the stomach.

In 1996, at the request of many friends and believers, Abbé Arnette published his extraordinary memoirs in book form. These memoirs include his childhood and youth, his work as an interpreter and at the same time a Resistance spy with the Paris Gestapo, his work as a moral policeman, his priestly vocation and his work in France, his imprisonment for flimsy political reasons under de Gaulle, and emigration to Germany and the new beginning in the Archdiocese of Freiburg and in the Diocese of Speyer.

The book was first published in French in 1996 under the title: De la Gestapo a l'OAS L'itinéraire atypique d'un homme de Dieu , and Abbé Arnette also appeared on French television in this context. The German edition followed in 1997 under the title As a spy at the Gestapo. The unusual career of a pastor at Theresia Verlag CH-6424 Lauerz. When the work appeared, the priest had just had to move from Frankenthal-Mörsch to Einselthum in the Zellertal for his services. That is why he often expressed humorously that if he had foreseen that he would end up in Einselthum, he would have chosen the title From Eiffel Tower to Einselthum for his German-language memories . But it was too late for that because the book was in print. In Germany, too, the clergy's unusual experiences caused a sensation. Pastor Arnette held readings by the author, had his say in various newspapers - even in the Bild newspaper - and made an appearance on television in the evening show of Rhineland-Palatinate.

Works

• De la Gestapo à l'OAS L'itinéraire atypique d'un homme de Dieu . Editions Filipacchi, Levallois-Perret 1996, ISBN 2-85018-399-7 . German-language edition: As a spy with the Gestapo . Theresia Verlag, Lauerz 1997, ISBN 3-908542-66-9 .

literature

• Raymond Arnette 65 years . In: Die Rheinpfalz , No. 29, from February 4, 1988, local edition Frankenthal.
• The second home is Mörsch - for the 40th anniversary of the consecration . In: Die Rheinpfalz , No. 148, from June 29, 1991, local edition Frankenthal.
• For the 40th anniversary of the ordination of senior teacher Arnette . In: Der Pilger , Speyer, No. 29, of July 21, 1991.
• An uncomfortable mind should be incapacitated . In: Die Rheinpfalz of February 17, 1996, local edition Frankenthal.
• Thanks to God and accompanying people - golden jubilee of senior teacher Raymond Arnette in Einselthum . In: Der Pilger , Speyer, No. 29, July 2001.
• After that, life goes on (obituary). In: Der Pilger , Speyer, No. 21, from May 23, 2004.
• Obituary in the pilgrimage calendar (yearbook of the Speyer diocese), 2005.

Web links

• Literature by and about Raymond Arnette in the catalog of the German National Library
• Website on the history of the ancient ritual parish of the Diocese of Speyer in Neustadt / Weinstraße, which emerged from Rev. Arnette's group (with extensive information about Rev. Arnette)